Changing Fortune Cookies

by P. D. Workman

  Erin stared down at the facts and figures in the notebook, her vision blurring.

  “Erin?”

  Erin closed her eyes, thinking.

  “What is it?” Mary Lou asked, her tone more urgent.

  “I’m not sure… I don’t know where it takes us or if it helps us to find him…”

  “What?”

  Erin opened her eyes and looked at the page she had open. “He’s written down all of the information on the prize monies and the costs of the contest. The sponsors and what they all contributed, stuff like that.”

  “Yes,” Mary Lou nodded. “A reporter would need to know the basics when starting a story.”

  “Yes… but we knew the prize monies back at the beginning before people entered the contest. That was what attracted so many people. The chance to win a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Right.”

  “Then why isn’t that information at the beginning of the notepad?”

  Mary Lou cocked her head to the side. “Does that matter? He needs it to write the story, whether it’s at the beginning or the end.”

  “He wrote it after Clayton was arrested.”

  “I don’t understand what your point is.”

  “All of that stuff was well-established by that point. And with everything that had happened, there was speculation that a lot of the local sponsors were going to lose money. The hotel, the restaurant that got blown up, there were all kinds of losses.”

  Mary Lou got up and walked across to the kitchen. She turned on an element on the stove and put the tea kettle over it.

  “Why is that important?”

  “I don’t think he was writing an article on how much money was being offered for the prizes.”

  “No. You’re right. It would be a bit late for that. And he must have included that information in his first article. It wasn’t published until after the winners were announced, but he must have written how much each one was awarded.”

  “Yeah. He did,” Erin agreed, remembering the little table showing that very information.

  “Then what is it you think he was writing about?”

  “Did the police say that they were going to send someone today?”

  “Yes… but I don’t know when. I didn’t encourage them to come immediately, because I knew you wanted to look at it before they got here.”

  “I think… do you think it’s possible that Chef Kirschoff’s reason for running the contest didn’t even have anything to do with food?”

  “Well… of course. It could have been the money rather than the food. But he was giving money away, so it wasn’t greed, was it?”

  “The sponsors must have provided some of that. Otherwise, why were there sponsors?” Erin mused. She watched Mary Lou watch the kettle.

  “But the prizes were announced before they recruited any sponsors. So the prize money must have come from Kirschoff. Or he already had it from somewhere.”

  “He comes here, he offers these great prizes, he says it’s all about culture and Tennessee and giving the local communities a well-deserved boost. But he’s never even been here before.”

  “He must have been, to be involved with Beryl,” Mary Lou pointed out.

  “But he said he’d never been…” Erin trailed off. Of course he had lied to her about it. To avoid any suspicion. He said it was his first time ever in Tennessee. Why would anyone think anything different? Why would anyone suspect him of being involved with one of the judges, who he had apparently never met before? “It wasn’t about the food. It wasn’t about Tennessee and giving our economy a boost and bringing our communities together. That was all just cover.”

  “But cover for what?”

  The kettle started to whistle.

  “It’s time to get up, Joshua.”

  Josh didn’t want to move. He was too tired to get out of bed. He didn’t know why anyone was waking him up in the middle of the night. He kept his eyes closed and tried to drift back off to sleep. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t seem to have any energy at all anymore, and the best thing for him to do was just to close his eyes and turn off his brain.

  He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to escape. He just wanted peace.

  The hooded figure was there. Hood and goggles. That was overdoing it a little, wasn’t it? He had nearly figured out who she was.

  At first, he hadn’t known. The figure dressed in shapeless clothes, hood, and goggles was sexless. It could have been anyone. And that had been the point, hadn’t it? To be anonymous. To keep her identity from Joshua.

  But he’d gradually pieced together that his captor wasn’t a man. She didn’t smell like a man, for one thing. Not that she was wearing a bunch of perfume, but he caught hints of her shampoo and deodorant when she leaned over him, and he knew they weren’t men’s products.

  It was hard to judge her height when he was lying on the bed. But he knew that when she sat on the edge of the bed to feed him that she was shorter than he was. He wasn’t huge, but mostly women were shorter than he was and men were taller. Campbell said that he’d shoot up the rest of the way one day and be as tall as any of the other boys in his grade.

  The whisper that was intended to hide her sex also masked her accent, but she seemed local. The speech patterns all sounded Tennessean. Her food tasted like his grandma’s food. No hints of different origins. No unusual spices or textures. All exactly like his grandma had made in her kitchen those autumns that he and Campbell had gone to help her with her canning and preserving. They didn’t come out of a can. She wasn’t lying when she said it was one of her grandma’s recipes.

  And he knew. He knew that taking him had not been chance. He hadn’t been held for ransom. She hadn’t wanted to harm him. But she had not planned to keep him alive, either. She hadn’t brought him regular meals or been concerned about his health. He’d been dehydrated since that first day, and she confirmed that she was intentionally withholding water.

  It wouldn’t be long. That’s what she had said.

  He didn’t know why she wanted to get him up now, but he didn’t see the point. It wouldn’t be anything good.

  Chapter 38

  Erin was hoping that she would be able to relax and they could work everything out once the sheriff got there. But when he showed up, he had Terry and K9 with him, which did not help Erin to relax at all. She had just told Terry that she was not going to be investigating Joshua’s disappearance. Then they had arrived to find out that she had been reading through the notebook and trying to come up with a theory on the case.

  He raised his eyebrows at her and didn’t say anything to censure her. But he also didn’t sit beside her on the couch. He sat on one of the easy chairs a few feet away. K9 lay down obediently beside Terry’s feet as he was trained to do, but he pointed his nose at Erin and whined, clearly confused by the situation.

  Welcome to the club, K9.

  It just didn’t seem like anything could be easy for her.

  Mary Lou explained about the notepad, how Erin had known that Joshua had used it when he was conducting his newspaper interviews and had taken note of the fact that the paper said he was going to be contributing further stories. So, one thing had led to another, and there Erin was, full of theories that she hoped to run by the police department. Like she was the detective and they were not the first line of investigation.

  Terry paid careful attention to Mary Lou and did not look at Erin, even when it was her turn to talk. Erin turned the notebook over to Sheriff Wilmot, open to the page that began with the listing of the prize monies.

  “He was investigating the financial affairs of the contest after it was finished,” Erin pointed out.

  Wilmot looked down at it. “Maybe. Or maybe he kept reference materials in the back and interview questions and notes in the front.”

  Erin frowned, thinking about that.

  “It’s an old technique,” Wilmot said. “Maybe not something that someone your age would have thought of…”

  �
�But Joshua is younger than I am.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where would he learn that?”

  “Maybe from a seasoned reporter. Someone mentoring him about how to handle the interviews and writing the article. Why would he use a notepad instead of something electronic? Because he was learning from someone old-school.”

  Erin cleared her throat and looked down.

  Was that all it was? He was keeping reference material in the back of the book?

  She didn’t believe it.

  “I don’t think that’s why,” she said, though all she had was a gut feeling and not proof. “I think… he was investigating the contest itself.”

  “For what?”

  “For something financial. Like… money laundering.”

  Wilmot considered this. He looked at Terry, who didn’t have anything to say about it.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I wondered a few times myself, when Chef Kirschoff first came here and said that he was going to run this contest. I wondered why he would choose to do it here, when he said he’d never even been in Tennessee before. If he was going to run a contest like that, why wouldn’t he do it in a bigger metropolis?”

  “But that’s an argument against trying to launder money here. It would make more sense for him to do it somewhere there were a lot of similar contests running and a bigger population, so it wasn’t as obvious, wouldn’t it?”

  “It depends. It was a big deal for us, and everybody knew it was going on, but there aren’t many federal agents out here who would ask questions. And all of those ‘know your client’ rules that banks have for money laundering, they would know exactly who Chef Kirschoff was, and that the money being transferred around was for the contest, right? They wouldn’t need to ask for a bunch of details, because they already know, it’s all for the contest. They know who Kirschoff is, they know the sponsors and the prize winners, so it’s all established.”

  “I suppose. So what exactly would make you think there is anything like money laundering going on? It all appeared to be aboveboard.”

  “He didn’t have sponsors before he came here. So, where was the money coming from?”

  “Maybe he was just confident in his ability to raise money,” Terry contributed.

  “A million dollars? The prize money itself was three-quarters. Then, you add in all of the expenses, advertising, honorariums for the judges, salaries for employees, and all of that. He knew that he could come into backwater Tennessee and raise a million dollars in a depressed economy?”

  “But he did, didn’t he?” Sheriff Wilmot turned a couple of pages in the notebook, where Joshua had written down the amounts being contributed by the various sponsors. “He was able to get the money, the venues, cover all expenses…”

  Erin nodded. “I’m no expert,” she said. “I’m not even great at math. But right from the beginning, it didn’t make sense to me. Especially on such a tight timeline. Why rush in and do this contest with only a few weeks’ lead-up? Somewhere he said he’d never been before?”

  “But he clearly had been here before,” Terry said. “Considering he was having some sort of affair with Beryl Batcombe. We don’t know how long he was planning the contest and what contacts or sponsors he already had in place when he got here. It seemed like it all fell into place pretty quickly.”

  Erin nodded.

  “Yeah. And there was the part about holding it in the winter. If you’re using dry ice, why not hold it at Halloween when you can tie into a spooky theme? Or if you’re making ice cream and cold beverages, then why not hold it in the summer when it’s hot and people will appreciate it more? Why hold something like that in the winter?”

  “Well, we’ll look into it,” Wilmot said. “I’ll review the notebook and maybe we’ll get the feds in to see if there was money laundering. But if there was… those investigations can take a long time and I’m not sure it gets us any closer to… figuring out what happened to Joshua.”

  “If he was investigating money laundering, then he was kidnapped to stop him from figuring it out,” Erin pointed out.

  “And that makes it… who? Kirschoff himself? Someone in his employ?”

  “It could have been Kirschoff, I suppose.” Erin thought it over. “But I thought he was out of town by then. He could have come back, or assigned someone else to do it, but pretty much all of the organizers were gone the day after the contest concluded. And… there was a woman involved. We know that.”

  “How do you know that?” Terry demanded.

  Erin looked over at him. “Because whoever called in to the Quiki to change the order impersonated me successfully. I suppose some men can do a convincing woman’s voice, but the more obvious solution is that it was a woman.”

  “Oh.” Terry looked taken aback. Obviously, he thought she had been digging more deeply than that, finding things that the police hadn’t and not letting them know. “So… a woman. It could have been a girlfriend.”

  “No.” Erin shook her head. “He was dating Charley.”

  “That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t dating someone else, from what I understand of the man’s morals. And,” Terry gave Erin an uncertain sideways look. “You know Charley’s history. Would you be able to say with one hundred percent certainty that she wasn’t involved? Even if it was only the phone call?”

  Erin knew that Charley’s history with organized crime was a problem. She could never say that Charley wouldn’t be involved with something like a kidnapping. She had turned out to be innocent of Bobby Dixon’s murder, but she had still been a soldier in the Dixon clan, until she and they found out that she had Jackson blood. Erin couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. She was pretty sure, but not that sure.

  “She’s your sister,” Mary Lou contributed. “Her voice is similar to yours. More Tennessee, but…”

  “She wouldn’t do something like that,” Erin insisted. But her face was warm and she knew that it was only her feeling, not proof of any kind.

  “Kirschoff could have been seeing someone else,” Wilmot reminded. “Or it could have been an employee. Or someone else who benefited from the money laundering scheme.”

  “Who benefits?” Erin asked. “I mean, besides Chef Kirschoff, who wouldn’t want it to be discovered?”

  “Anyone involved in the money laundering.”

  “The promoters,” Terry contributed. “It sullies their reputation to find out they were involved in something like that, even if it was innocently.”

  “You and Miss Victoria as judges,” Mary Lou said.

  The thought made Erin sick. If she didn’t know what was going on, how could she be thrown in with everyone else? But she knew it was true. If it turned out that the contest was just one big money laundering scheme, it would reflect badly on everyone involved. And everyone knew that she and Vic had been involved, that Auntie Clem’s Bakery had gotten as much positive publicity out of it as they could, under Charley’s direction. If the contest was tainted, so were they all.

  “The winners of the contest,” Terry said. “What is going to happen to their prize winnings? Do they lose it? Does it get tied up for ten years while the feds investigate?”

  “I have no idea,” Wilmot said, shaking his head. “I’ve never been involved in an investigation like that.”

  “They participated in good faith,” Erin protested, “they didn’t know what was going on.” She would feel terrible if Bella got bad publicity and lost her winnings. She had been counting on putting her money toward college. She didn’t know the other winners very well, but she felt bad for them too.

  “Maybe I’m just imagining things. Maybe there’s good reason for all of this…”

  Sheriff Wilmot raised his brows. “It’s not for us to decide whether it’s true or not, just to follow the breadcrumbs. No one is going to even know that you suggested it, unless you spread it around town.”

  “Well…” Erin’s face got warm. “Sometimes things do leak from the police department.”
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br />   Wilmot and Terry looked at each other, and the sheriff nodded, conceding the fact. “Sometimes, they do.”

  “But this isn’t about who would suffer if money laundering was exposed,” Mary Lou said flatly. “This is about finding my son.”

  Erin needed to hear that. “Yes. It’s about Joshua,” she agreed. And she knew Bella would give up all of her money if she knew that it meant Josh could be returned home safely. Bella was just that kind of person. She cared for others. And Josh, even though he wasn’t a close friend, was still someone she cared about.

  “We’ll need to dig down,” Wilmot told Terry. “Background on the winners. Anyone that Joshua mentioned having an interview with either in the article in the paper or in that notebook. They are all suspects—” He glanced aside at Erin. “Especially the women. They are the first priority.”

  “Can you find him?” Mary Lou asked, looking at Wilmot, her eyes as intense as spotlights. “Is this going to find him, or is it just going to… make someone take action if they haven’t already?” She looked at her watch. “Or has it been too long to even have hope anymore?”

  “We have to have hope,” Erin encouraged. “Don’t give up.”

  “But I need to know. I need to know whether to expect to find him again.” She stared at the sheriff. “Please.”

  His mouth thinned and formed a straight line across. “I don’t know, ma’am.” He gave a little headshake. “At this point… it doesn’t look good.”

  Chapter 39

  Sheriff Wilmot and Terry got up. They had work to do. It was late in the day, and maybe it was already too late for Joshua, but they had to try what they could.

  “Erin, I’ll drop you at home,” Terry said, reaching a hand toward her to help her up.

  Erin stayed where she was. “If you don’t need the truck, just leave it here and I’ll get home in a bit. If you need it, go ahead. I can walk.”